-: In module four, we're gonna talk about systemic
regulation of metabolism, so we're gonna need
to look at a little bit of systems biology.
So as we step through here, our first unit will be
part one of systems biology, specifically for trainers.
So it's gonna focus on the things that are most important
for program design which is gonna be the nervous system,
the endocrine system, and the muscular system.
Now, there's obviously more systems than that,
and then take into context the cardiovascular system
is also important, but in the third course where we look
at the assessment, we're really gonna be looking at what
is a person's incoming cardiovascular health.
We can look at things like HRV and whatnot and discussing
those things in terms of trainability coming in.
But in terms of our program design, these are the things
that are really gonna be, you know, that are gonna correlate
to how we're gonna change sets, reps, and the training
variables that we would use when designing a program
and a nutritional program, and these are gonna be things
considering, like, what are our actual options
to train in terms of the cardiovascular system.
So we'll start with the nervous system.
If we look at the nervous system, it's gonna basically
be the thing that integrates our conscious
and subconscious information.
So if I wanna do an exercise, or just the simplest thing.
If I wanna pick something up, I have my brain,
you know, telling muscles what to do,
and there's the conscious part of that, of me saying,
I wanna go and pick up this pen.
And then there's the interpretation
of my subconscious saying, okay, how are we gonna
actually carry about the desire of my conscious mind,
and, you know, don't get all like woo,
that's deep stuff on me.
It's really this simple, all right.
In terms of managing the joints and all of the tissues
and everything that's going on, like, consciously,
we can't even manage our breathing.
So there has to be this separation
between conscious and subconscious.
And so what that does is it allows my nervous system
to deal with this massive complexity of information
that's going on throughout the entire body
without overloading my conscious mind.
Like, I wouldn't be able to think about what I need to do,
because I would be too busy managing, like, all
of the things that are going on simultaneously 24/7/365.
I need to have that separation.
But what that does is it tells you there is
this separation between what my intent is
and what my subconscious solution to carrying out that is.
And both of those will be two important factors
when we look at training the nervous system,
teaching our body to be better to movement,
because there will be things I can do that'll affect
the way that my body figures out how to do that movement
regardless of my conscious input, and that will,
that will largely depend on things like setup
and whatnot and how I choose to setup an exercise.
Do I make it so that mechanically,
my body finds the solution on its own, or is it something
where I have to think really hard to get my body
to contract or do this movement in that particular way.
I wanna essentially be able to train both of those,
the subconscious and the unconscious adaptations
for the nervous system.
But without getting on too big of a tangent,
if we look at our nervous system, we're gonna
communicate, one, with electrical impulses, right?
So there's gonna be signals from my brain,
goes through an electrical chemical gradient,
and that's going to eventually reach my muscular system.
But we also have these things called neurotransmitters,
which are essentially like the hormones for the nervous
system, if you will, but I would say a higher order.
So when we look at brain chemistry,
brain chemistry tends to be on a higher order
of what our body is doing hormonally,
because the nervous system is simply the king, right?
So dopamine supersedes cortisol, in a sense,
and if you're not familiar with those,
we're gonna get into detail with that.
But what my brain chemistry does is a precursor
to what my hormone balance is gonna be in my body,
because my nervous system is ultimately the thing
that's governing everything else.
There are certain things that can function
in kind of a closed loop, because they need
to auto-regulate, but my nervous system is doing
a lot of systemic regulation of my entire system,
of all of my organs and all of my tissues.
So, we have that, and then the other thing that's unique
about my nervous system is it learns over time,
and my body, at a cellular level, adapts,
but it doesn't really learn, whereas my nervous system
is something that could essentially be programmed, right?
So I can learn, okay, when I'm thinking this,
like, if I'm thinking squat, right, the way I squat today
may be different than six weeks from now.
So if I teach my brain and my nervous system
to be more efficient in a squat, when I think squat,
it's gonna do something differently six weeks from now
than it is today, because it's gonna adapt.
That subconscious portion of it is gonna learn
how to do that squat more efficiently,
so when I consciously think, we're gonna squat,
the outcome will be different,
'cause it's gonna adapt, it's gonna learn.
It's gonna reprogram what's going on in the glutes,
the quads, the calves, the hamstrings,
all of the muscles that are stabilizing and supporting
the knees and the hips, the ankle throughout that position,
to be more and more efficient over time.
It's going to learn.
When we look at the neuromuscular position,
okay, that's when the nervous system is gonna meet
the muscular tissue, and this is essentially
where the signal from the nervous system
is going to impact the muscular tissue in some way.
And what that's gonna do is it's gonna affect
what we contract.
So my nervous system could send out a signal
to multiple muscles.
It could send it out to multiple motor units,
so multiple parts of a single muscle
to be able to contract more of that muscle at once.
So, this is gonna affect,
so, execution is gonna be huge in this, right,
affecting what we contract.
The other thing is how much of it that we can contract.
So, my nervous system basically can learn over time
the ability to create more of a single muscle at once,
which is what leads us to be able
to lift more weight in one particular repetition.
It also will affect how we contract and the way we contract.
So whether or not we contract dynamically,
like explosively, whether or not we're contracting
and accelerating, whether or not we're contracting
slow and controlled, and that kind of overlaps
into this intensity thing, which is really,
in a sense, my nervous system is gonna have
basically like two frequencies that it fires.
One of them is going to fire the slow twitch stuff,
and then as that frequency goes up, so it's like
the signal becomes much more rapid, it switches over,
and fast twitch fibers start to get engaged.
So, part of me learning is learning when something
is gonna require those fast twitch fibers and when it's not,
because from an energy conservation perspective,
I wanna use slow twitch whenever I can,
because it doesn't cost as much fuel,
but I wanna use fast twitch when the conditions require it,
and I know that that's either like, good for survival,
or as we get into the neurological phase,
you'll see that I can actually find ways
to use fast twitch, and because of the physics aspect,
because of momentum and things like that,
it actually ends up being cheaper to do the exercise
more explosively than slowly.
So teaching our body how to recruit more fast twitch is
gonna revolve around getting those conditions in training.
Now, when we look at making our body more efficient,
there's the slow twitch component, but there's also
just simply being able to use the right tissue
at the right time.
So at any given joint, you have agonist, antagonist.
And so as I'm extending and flexing my elbow here,
my bicep and my tricep and all of my elbow flexors
and extensors, they're all coordinating that loop,
and one has to be letting the movement happen
while the other one is doing
the actual work to create the motion.
So, when we look at efficiency,
it's like having no wasted energy.
So that means my agonist work only as much as they need to.
My antagonists, we'll say relax,
but they let that, they go through that eccentric,
like, as efficiently as possible, because if they're
inefficient, then the agonist might have to work more,
'cause it's righting the antagonist a little bit.
And then the stabilizers have to be coordinated.
So it's all about what fires when and how much.
As I learn to do that, my body wastes less energy
to do movements or to move loads,
which is the main reason why we gain strength
and exercising gets easier when we start training.
As we learn a new movement, our body gets better
at not wasting energy and coordinating which muscles fire
when and to what degree in order to manage all of the joints
and tissues that are supporting that movement.
It becomes less wasteful, more efficient, and that's
where we see most progress, at the beginning, right?
'Cause of overcoming resistance of the weight is one thing,
but overcoming resistance of our own tissue
or our own efficiency is another.
So we learn to be able to do a movement
with the least amount of work, and then,
as we add load and we add resistance,
depending on how we are applying force against that,
like, what type of contraction we're doing,
what type of load it is, we will learn
what is the most efficient way to be able to train that way.
And so, depending on what our ultimate goal is
for the nervous system, we may need
to shift up those variables.